Photo: Wenn
Content relating to Thom Yorke's second solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes has been downloaded over a million times.
Yorke released the album exclusively through BitTorrent and the site stats report his second solo LP has been downloaded 1.1 million times (although this figure does include the free bundle). If the million downloads had all generated sales Yorke would have earned £3,730,0000 from the release.
However, as reporting by Consequence Of Sound, according to a Bittorent representative: “By the artist’s request, we are not disclosing sales figures, But we have been very happy with what is happening.”
Watch the video for 'A Brain In A Bottle' below
Thom Yorke - "A Brain In A Bottle"
You can download the album here, and check out the Gigwise track by track review.
Upon the album's release a week ago Yorke explained he was looking for an “effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work. Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves. Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.”
BitTorrent's Chief Content Officer, Matt Mason, recently spoke to The Fader about the release and what he hopes can come out of this experiment.
Mason revealed that the idea of the BitTorrent bundle was in fact inspired by Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want model for their seventh album ‘In Rainbows’ and said: “It’s just been the absolute gold standard for how to do something direct-to-fan on the internet.”
When the BitTorrent executive was introduced to Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich through Radiohead’s manager, the album was not completed. Mason explained "I don’t know if Thom would have made the album anyway, but he wasn’t planning on making a new album when we started talking to them. The idea of releasing something came out of the conversations that we had, which was, for us, incredibly humbling that they believed in this technology to the extent of actually making something especially for it.”
Sizing up the competition, Mason went onto say that he believes BitTorrent offers more over similar companies such as Bandcamp. “Bandcamp’s great, they’ve done a fantastic job and I would never discourage anyone from putting anything on Bandcamp, but the difference between BitTorrent and every other direct-to-fan service is [that] we have a truly global audience that we can put Bundles in front of.”
Indeed, BitTorrent’s audience is vast. The service reaches 170 million people each month, making it an audience larger than twice the combined audience of Spotify, Netflix, Hulu and BandCamp.
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